p the Sloanes after his marriage."

He whistled softly.

"If she can prove that Webster should have married her daughter, that
he's in need of anything like sixty-five thousand dollars--where does he
get off? He gets off safely if the Brace woman ever sees fit to
tell--what? I couldn't guess if my whittling hand depended on it." He
grimaced his repugnance.

"What a woman! A mania for wickedness--evil from head to foot,
thoroughly. _She_ wouldn't stick at murder--if she thought it safe.
She'd do anything, say anything. Every word she uttered this morning had
been rehearsed in her mind--with gestures, even. When I beat her, I beat
this puzzle; that's sure."

That he had to do with a puzzle, he had no manner of doubt. The very
circumstances surrounding the discovery of the girl's body--Arthur
Sloane flashing on the light in his room at a time when his being awake
was so unusual that it frightened his daughter; Judge Wilton stumbling
over the dead woman; young Webster doing the same thing in the same
instant; the light reaching out to them at the moment when they bent
down to touch the thing which their feet had encountered--all that
shouted mystery to his experienced mind.

He thought of Webster's pronouncement: "The thug, acting on the spur of
the moment, with a blow in the dark and a getaway through the
night----" Here was reproduction of that in real life. Would people say
that Webster had given himself away in advance? They might.

And the weapon, what about that? It could have been manufactured in ten
minutes. Crown had said over the wire that Russell's nail file was
missing. What if Webster's, too, were missing? He would see--although he
expected to uncover no such thing.

He came, then, to Lucille's astounding idea, that her father must be
"protected," because he was nervous and, being nervous, might incur the
enmity of the authorities. He could not take that seriously. And yet the
most fruitful imagination in the world could fabricate no motive for
Arthur Sloane's killing a young woman he had never seen.

Only Webster and Russell could be saddled with motives: Webster's,
desperation, the savage determination to rid himself of the woman's
pursuit; Russell's, unreasoning jealousy.

So far as facts went, the crime lay between those two--and he could not
shake off the impression that Mrs. Brace, shrilly asserting Russell's
innocence, had known that she spoke the absolute truth.

VII

THE HOSTILITY O